Mishatu's Guide to Habitarium

Habitarium is a mysterious game where rumors of massive amounts of NP are distributed widely and with little effort... But wait, you say those rumors are true?!

The short story is this: you enslave little petpetpets (commonly known as p3's), and they earn you NP.

"But that sounds like my little brother!" you may say. But can you throw your little brother into a house whenever he starts whining about being tired or hungry? Will he work at a steady pace overnight?

Habitarium is a pain in the butt at the beginning. You have very few p3's, and they don't really do much of anything. Set the workers and nesters up at the mud, stone, and wood resources. (Soldiers are lazy bastards who only build and fight pests) Save up your resources for houses and nests. You will want 3 nests and a house for every 5 (later 7) p3's.

Once you have your nests, sit your nesters on them. If your p3's are telling you that they're hungry or sleepy, throw them in the house. Don't bother buying food.

Pests:

Pests are annoying little blue buggers. They like to attack your nesters, your resources, whatever they can get at. Your workers and soldiers can both attack them, but the workers are far more likely to die when doing so. However, when the pests finally die, a little red gem pops up worth 30 Exp.

If you're actually paying attention to the game when they show up, you can just F5 and they'll go away. Or, when you have enough resources to spare, you can block off access points to the resources you use (I also block in the p3's so they don't wander off).

If one of your resources is damaged, you have a few options. Without help, it will take 3 hours until the resource is good to go again and you can set your workers at another resource. You can also go to the Habitarium boards on Neo and ask for resource repair from the kind users there.

At low levels, it's hard to get enough resources for buildings. Fortunately, a lot of level 50 players will be giving stuff away on the Habi boards. At any given time, approximately 80% of the threads on the first page are all gifting. What they will do is friend you, gift you the item through Habi, then unfriend you. It's a great way for fast experience as well as for people to get rid of resources they don't want.

Nesters:

These guys are handy fellows. You sit them on a nest and an hour/hour and a half-ish later, you get an egg! You have 3 options: harvest it, hatch it, or discard it.

Harvest it: This puts the egg in your bag. You will want to keep at least enough eggs in your bag to repopulate your habi at least once (although I hear many people have enough to repopulate twice). This is because your little slaves have the odd tendency to die after a week. I normally keep 2 soldiers and nesters of each species and spam the rest of 3 pages with workers.

Hatch it: This is most convenient when you either just got a population increase or one of your p3's just died. It means you don't have to go all the way to your bag to get out a new p3.

Discard it: In the later levels, this will be your favorite button. Discarding eggs gives you 200 exp per egg. The annoying bit? It takes a level 3 nest and level 3 nester to fully incubate an egg in 50 minutes.You will want to keep at least one population slot open so you can see what kind of egg has been incubated.

Workers:

These guys work hard and are great at collecting resources. They collect resources in half the time it takes a nester to collect them and they repair buildings.

P3 Death:

P3's can die from two ways: Fighting pests or natural death

Pests can kill p3's by fighting them. The best way to avoid this is to ensure that your workers and nesters are blocked off from pest access. I have yet to see a soldier die from fighting pests, although I don't doubt that it is possible.

Natural death: P3's die every 7 days. I know you care very deeply about your slaves, but it's just a natural fact of life (even pixellated life). If you want to see how close a p3 is to a natural death, click on the p3 and on the little window that tells you his health and hunger meter, click the right arrow. There will be a bar with 3 gems on it, each gem larger than the one to its left. The closer the bar is to the right, the closer it is to its natural death.

Methods of playing Habi:

There are two main ways people play Habi: staying logged in all the time, or periodically opening and closing Habi.

If you stay logged in all the time (and your little brother doesn't also play Neopets), you will want to have mostly workers in your Habi. Leaving it open means they can constantly work and earn you exp, either for your next level or for more purple gems. Most common ratio for these players is 39 workers/3 nesters/3 soldiers at level 50.

Opening and closing Habi: You will want a primarily nester population. The eggs will keep incubating while you're away, and you will have to discard them once you come back. I don't know the most common ratio for these players because it's honestly less efficient than the mostly worker players. You could probably get away with a completely nester population, but I would recommend a couple of workers in order to repair the nests when they degrade over time.

Buildings:

There are 5 different buildings available: house, nest, barracks, storage, and hospital. They can each be upgraded to level 3 (with the exception of the barracks, which can only be upgraded to level 2).

I've tried lining this up, but it's not working, so I have changed the color so it's a little easier to tell which numbers are for which category.

The only information I have about raiding is that it's mostly a waste of time. You send soldiers over to a neofriend's Habi, they fight and maybe gain a few resources. There's also a high chance that you will lose a soldier or two. Add to this the fact that your neofriend (if not warned of the attack ahead of time) will probably unfriend you, and you've got a pretty worthless player-player interaction. This is probably the primary reason gifters unfriend as soon as they have gifted.

Reducing Lag

Lag is annoying, particularly when you've got a level 50 Habi running. Before you start doing anything with your p3's, make sure the Habitarium sound and music are turned off. Run adblocker if you're in FF or Chrome (I don't know if there's an IE equivalent, but knowing you guys means I'll get laughs just for putting that). Neopets likes to refresh the ads part of the page constantly, which stresses the computer out like none other. Adblocker puts a stop to their nonsense. You can also zoom in insanely far and focus on one of the non-p3 areas, but it only works if you aren't actively taking care of your p3's (which only happens once in a while anyways).

Inside Habi, your first step is to block off all of your storages. p3's running back and forth is a waste of your valuable time, whether you're watching them or not. Supplies still go in storage, whether they can get to them or not.

Second step is to block your p3's in with their resource. Put a decoration to its left, right, and behind. The diagonals DO NOT MATTER. p3's are dumb and are incapable of moving diagonally. They do like to move around after pests get destroyed and they sometimes get distracted from their duty. Some people also place a decoration on top of the p3's once they're all working to prevent pests, but it can be bothersome to remember to remove the decoration to put the p3's back after their nap.

Bonus tips:

Helping out a neofriend gives you 50 exp, but you can only help them once every 24 hours.At level 50, move as many buildings/decorations to the bottom edges of the screen for purple gem free space. They only spawn in the original 11x11 area you started with.You can surf Neopets and do whatever you want while it's running, but KEEP THE TAB OPEN. Once it's closed, your workers will harvest 10 more resource each, then stop.At level 50, you can spam-click the purple gems for 3-4k each instead of the regular 500 NP each. Apparently only works for some people, so I'm sorry if it doesn't work for you Proof that it works: On 3/29/12, I had 430 NP on hand before spam-clicking 3 purple gems. After, I had 4,930 NP when I should have had 1930 NP.

This is just the very basics. If you want to know more, just ask, and I'll answer your question as well as update the guide I will probably also add more when I remember more important things.

Updated with zooming in for reducing lag and a notice that spam clicking doesn't always work.

BluePenance: If you're not running any of the codex programs, just set up Habi and let it run. Honestly, all I really ever do is check for gems. It is really a boring game overall, but since it's minimal effort, I find it worth playing anyways. Also, I think new levels are in the works, because at the max levels for buildings, you can still click the upgrade button and you get a notification that says you can't upgrade until some level higher than 50. No idea when the levels may be coming out, though

I will get pictures up eventually, but my free time has been rather sporadic and taking screenies and editing them is a bit time-consuming. More updates will be on their way. I'm only doing the small things right now as I have the time.

BluePenance: If you're not running any of the codex programs, just set up Habi and let it run. Honestly, all I really ever do is check for gems. It is really a boring game overall, but since it's minimal effort, I find it worth playing anyways. Also, I think new levels are in the works, because at the max levels for buildings, you can still click the upgrade button and you get a notification that says you can't upgrade until some level higher than 50. No idea when the levels may be coming out, though

I pretty much just AB whenever my laptop is on and my battery is crud so I have to keep it plugged in. But, trying to save money on the electric bill so leaving my laptop on all day isn't something I'm willing to do for now.

Yeah, it's been like that ever since Habi started and I wouldn't hold my breath for TNT releasing an update with more levels. Habi is glitchy/faulty they should be focusing on that instead tbh, if they're even doing anything at all.

In what consist that "glitching"? Is something like quickly clicking a purple gem so the exp overlap and it count as 2 or 3 purple gems for just one?

Yup I like to call it spam-clicking. It's nice if you only have a couple of purple gems on the screen, but it gets annoying when you have a screenful of gems. While it's totally worth spam-clicking all of them, it makes Habi lag like a bitch on my computer, and Habi rarely lags for me.

I know I haven't updated, but life's been bitching at me and I need to study far more than I have been If you have ideas for what pictures could go under some of the headings, feel free to PM me. Also, ideas for possible screenshots could work as well.

Oh no! I'm sorry I can guide you to some petpages that can help, if you like.

/~Fish will help you figure out what kind of lockout it is and link you to some guides that can help you fix it.

Yeah, I got it working in chrome through the merge method. It's like almost 6am but I doubt I can go to sleep now. Thanks for the help though!(p.s. found out that the spam clicking works in chrome. lol!)

Yeah, I got it working in chrome through the merge method. It's like almost 6am but I doubt I can go to sleep now. Thanks for the help though!(p.s. found out that the spam clicking works in chrome. lol!)

Yay for getting it working. Sad for the early morning/lack of sleep. Yay for the being useful!

And are you sure that you're not seeing +500NP multiple times, but you're still only getting 500NP total? I know the exp gems when clicked multiple times do NOT give you multiple exp.

At level 50, the purple gems appear every 1000 exp earned. When you do the spam-clicking right, you see the +500NP overlapped on itself several times. Honestly, it seems like you should be getting a lot more than just 2-3k from one gem simply from the number of times it appears, but it does add up. I do know it works because I normally get 30-something k in the morning after running it all night, but have been getting 50-something k in the morning with the spam-clicking.

I have no idea why the red exp gems don't do it as well, but maybe it's because those can actually stack on the screen while the purple gems can't.